Death Notes: Mine Your Step

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Mine Your Step communicates with text rather than speech, but I didn’t need to hear him to know that R. Lee Ermey was barking at me as I skirted around the bloody remnants of those who had gone before. It’s a free, browser-based asynchronous multiplayer game, in which Ermey’s commands provide clues but the best method of plotting a course through each level is to let hundreds of other people play first. There are mines, you see, and stepping on one turns even the hardiest soldier into a blood puddle. Those puddles have purpose though, eventually forming a border, marking the one safe path. You can read the names of the dead, little more than signposts now. Sort of reminds me of VESPER5, except the solitude and ritual have become explosions and blood. Via Indiegames.com.

It seems like it tages ages to load the blood which makes the game completely unplayable. Hell, it doesn’t even show your own blood of the previous tries.
Also, this really reminds me of Deaths by Jesse Venbrux where the bodies not only serve as signs of where somebody died, but also as platforms.

This seems like it would have been a lot more interesting if a bunch of people (50+?) were playing it at once, the board started out empty, and it was a race. Perhaps you could evoke something similar by recording when each death was relative to the player starting the game, and displaying them at that time delta; eg, if Dudeguy dies at 5, 12, and 26 seconds in, then his blood splotches appear on your screen after you’ve had it loaded for 5, 12, 26 seconds.

The board starting empty is a bug. I think the developer didn’t stress-tested his system enough before going live and the servers weren’t providing the blood decals at some point.

In my case I just started playing it and it was filled with blood (up until the level 11, who’s half-bloodied (I’m currently trying to find the remaining half), but I think it’s more due to people giving up at that point rather than a bug.

The overall idea is neat, but I think it would be better if we could start over from checkpoint (little flags scattered around the map) or lead a squad of 5 soldiers (the 4 following your movement, a few meters behind) : not everyone can sink a full hour in a one-cool-trick-pony game.

EDIT: ho crap “too many deaths on lvl11, seems that not all blood is loaded. link to greenslimegames.com … is much clearer”. It’s a bug !

The learning curve seems a little steep in places, it really seems to encourage trial and error after a certain point.

I’d have preferred it if the patterns of the mine laying slowly developed of their own accord through levels, so that you can make educated guesses about what might be coming next, but there’s still something to be said for the slow brute force of loads of people getting stuck on a certain level and filling out it’s details.

That in itself may eventually form a kind of automatic difficulty adjustment..